Oh, yes.
The morning improved at once.
“Old family recipe,” she said, aiming the glass in my direction and waiting for me to take it from her hand. “Passed along from generation to generation for—oh, three or four weeks now. Don’t think. Drink.”
She waited for me to do it and I thought about saying no, but I didn’t say anything like that because she was standing there in glowing good health and fully clothed in a rusty-red practice leotard and therefore in a position of obvious moral ascendancy over a one-eyed man sitting on the edge of an unfamiliar bed in his skivvies. And anyway, it didn’t really matter whether the contents of the glass cured me or killed me. Either way would have to be an improvement.
It was chilled and spicy, and I drank it all and was about to hand the empty glass back when it exploded.
“That’s the cayenne,” Maxey said, evidently reading my expression.
Something powerful went to work on the nerve centers at the back of my head, tingling and pummeling as it moved down my spine to the muscles of the shoulder yoke and on to lower regions. There was an itch I couldn’t scratch about three inches below the surface in the vicinity of my kidneys and it moved rapidly into my hips and thighs.
“Ginseng,” Maxey said. “And other things. Being a nurse has its uses.”
She took the glass back without further commentary, showed me which door led to the bathroom and which to the living room, and left me to deal with recovery in my own way.
I did my best.
And it seemed to be good enough.
Toweling on the mat a few minutes later, I was surprised but not displeased to hear myself humming a light and somewhat bawdy song. The day was definitely on an upswing.
I took the prosthetic eye out and cleaned it as well as I could without the special chemical bath I had learned to use, and went through the still unfamiliar routine of plopping it back into the socket. There, now! The stubble-crusted face that looked back at me from the mirror was not handsome. But I recognized it as one I had seen before, and that was a victory of sorts.
I crawled regretfully back into yesterday’s shirt, socks, trousers, and shoes and went out to peddle the abject apology I had been manufacturing for the past several minutes.
But I never got to recite it.
Maxey was sitting at a table beside a window that looked out on an apartment courtyard and pool, peering at a newspaper through the owl-eyed glasses I remembered, and the plate across from her was piled with toast, cantaloupe, and orange slices.
She seemed to be interested in something on the financial page, but tore herself away to look up at me when I sat down.
“Better?” she inquired.
“Immeasurably,” I said.
That got the first real smile of the morning.
“Hah!” she said. “You’re back to speaking English.”
Oh, God...
“Was I really that bad last night?”
There was coffee in a large glass pot, and she turned away to pour it before answering.
“You’re Mexican?” she said.
I shook my head and regretted it at once. Recovery, I decided, was not quite complete.
“German and Irish,” I said. “Descended from a long line of drunkards and pig thieves. But as I understand it my parents were busy doing something or other that kept them away from home a lot just after I was born, so they had a live-in Cuban nanny for me and it was easier for her to speak to me in Spanish than in English...so that turned out to be my first language.”
She put the paper down; the weird story seemed to fascinate her.
Odd. It had always bored the hell out of me.
“How old were you when you finally learned English?” she said.
“Well, Maria—that was her name, Maria Edrosa—died when I was six, I guess, and my parents came home and found out they weren’t exactly on speaking terms with their only child, so they stayed around for a while and I learned English and who they were and all of that. But I never really got over thinking of Maria as mamacita.”
“Or missing her?”
“Or missing her.”
We drank coffee and munched toast, and I tried some of the cantaloupe and it was fine and after a few minutes I finally decided I had the guts to try a little exculpatory rhetoric. But Maxey cut it short after the fourth or fifth word.
“Look,” she said, “if this is the beginning of an apology or a dutiful declaration of undying affection or something sticky like that, you’d be doing me a real favor by keeping it to yourself. Okay?”
“Well...”
“No ‘well’ about it.” She poured herself more coffee, offered some to me, and put the pot back on the automatic heat plate when I made a negative motion.
I think she was almost ready to leave it at that, but there was something else. I could see it was setting off some kind of reaction inside her, but I couldn’t get the sense of what it might be, and that worried me a little because if it was compassion—pity—for me, after my tale of woe, I was going to have to tip my hat and slowly ride away into the sunrise, and I had just realized that I didn’t want to do that at all.
But it wasn’t pity. Or anything connected with what I’d started to say. I realized, eventually, that the turmoil I had noticed was nothing more than the effort to keep a straight face. She was trying not to laugh about something. And having a real struggle.
“The thing is,” she said, “I don’t think you remember a lot about last night, do you?”
“Uh...no.”
Some of the laughter broke through for a moment, and she sipped the coffee to cover it, but it wasn’t totally effective and finally she went on.
“Well, then,” she said, “I’m not going to go through a play-by-play. And what I said about not needing an apology still goes. Nothing happened last night that I didn’t expect or want to happen. I’m just sorry only one of us remembers.
“All the same, if we’re going to see each other again—and I kind of hope we’ll want to, because yesterday was the first real fun I’ve had since I got to this Christforsaken town—I can’t help hoping that booze isn’t a big item in your life. Because, lover, I have to tell you that liquor—or anyway, tequila—seems to have a really odd effect on your bedroom manners.”
I groaned inwardly.
“You mean, I—”
She shook her head emphatically. “No,” she said. “You’re not reading me. I said I enjoyed the evening, and I meant it. But a girl likes a little romance—a touch of tenderness here and there. Macho moves are fine in their place, and God knows I’m not protecting the Star of India in here or anything. I have had my share of propositions and accepted some of them, and one or two have even been worth remembering.
“But there are limits.
“Offhand, I can’t remember a single one before last night that consisted of simply picking me up and carrying me into my own bedroom roaring ‘Abajo con tus pantalones!’ at the top of his lungs.”
A SERMON
(CONTINUED)
We insist, against all logic and all evidence, that the hands to which we have entrusted these instruments of total annihilation are sane hands. Reasonable hands. Hands that will not kill us all by whim...
TWELVE
Back in the here-and-now of penthouses and assassins and hospital murders and rampant nostalgia, Maxey laughed and put down the menu.
“You order,” she said. “I’m hungry as a bitch wolf, and you always seemed to come up with just the right things.”
It wasn’t a total answer to the question that had been in my mind, but any lingering doubts were dispelled a moment or two later when I looked up from pretending to concentrate on the text to find her still grinning at me.
“Something?”
“You.”
“My friends all seem to laugh a lot lately. I’ve been wondering about it.”
“And you seem to bullshit a lot, lover. Don’t tell me you weren’t wandering around in our mutual
memory book. I was in there myself, and I saw you.”
Well, okay, then.
“I may have let an old afternoon or two cross my mind,” I said.
“Hah!”
“And maybe even an evening.”
She snorted again, but seemed to accept the admission in lieu of further discussion. She wasn’t ready to leave the subject, though. And neither, I suppose, was I.
The smile faded and I went back to the menu, gradually narrowing the choices down to a question of rainbow beef in lettuce leaves or the Peking duck with Chinese pancakes. I was considering the relative merits of stir-fried snow peas and water chestnuts as compared to braised cauliflower and oyster sauce when she spoke again, shattering the still fragile texture of the present with a single sentence.
“Do you still dream about Sara?” she asked.
The answer was yes. Of course.
Two days after Maxey and I met, I had paid a final visit to the little downtown hole-in-the wall hotel where I’d been staying, and moved my total possessions—which did not quite fill one battered carry-on bag—into the spare closet of Maxey’s apartment. She said she’d had a problem recently with half-drunk show patrons following her home and would feel safer if I was around. But I never believed a word of it. Even then, I knew there would be few if any problems that Maxey couldn’t find some simple, nonmuscular way of resolving.
And the muscular solutions were no problem, either.
I had begun studying t’ai chi ch’uan—the Oriental art of muscular control, balance, and contemplation—at the hospital, where it was part of the rehabilitation therapy, and thereafter developed a kind of life of its own.
I was surprised and fascinated to discover that many of the ballet exercises that Maxey put herself through every morning were almost exactly translatable to—and from—some of the convoluted positions of t’ai chi, and she seemed as pleased as I to have companionship in the regular hour-long workouts that were followed, usually, by a mutual shower that always seemed to take longer than it had to—and always seemed time well spent.
So I was surprised, and more than a little taken aback, when she sprang the question on me just after our shower on the morning of our fifth day together.
“Who’s Sara?” she asked.
I had been drying her back, and I didn’t stop. But I chose my words carefully, wanting to use as few of them as possible to tell whatever was going to have to be told.
“Sara was my wife,” I said.
She accepted this in silence, and I waited for the next question.
“Was?” she inquired after a moment.
“She died,” I said. “A little more than two years ago.”
“Oh.”
More silence, and I finished with the back—this time without the embellishments that had become almost a part of the routine—and she turned to face me.
“Did you kill her?” she said.
She had asked the right question, but I wasn’t sure I knew the right answer. I’m still not.
It was no, in the sense that I hadn’t pulled any trigger and had in fact been otherwise occupied several thousand miles away at the time my Sara died.
But it was also yes, in several ways that mattered—and discussing them with shrinks at the hospital hadn’t done much to resolve the matter.
“I’m talking in my sleep?”
Maxey nodded solemnly, the deep-colored eyes even more dominant in a face somehow younger and almost defenseless in its total innocence of makeup.
“Sometimes,” she said, “it’s in Spanish, and I can’t get much of it, and sometimes it’s in some language I don’t recognize at all. Vietnamese, maybe; it sounds sort of Oriental.”
“That,” I said, “or Chinese. I speak a little Mandarin and some Hakka.”
“But when you dream in English,” Maxey went on, undiverted, “it’s usually about this Sara. And how it’s your fault that she’s dead.”
Well.
Hell.
I nodded and didn’t answer at once and we put on our clothes and by that time the coffee was hot again and we sat down and I told as much of the story as I could and I think Maxey’s own intelligence filled in whatever blanks were left.
Sara and I were married the day I graduated from Sewanee. She was there three days later when I was ordained, traveled with me to the Midwest, where I was assigned a missionary circuit of four starveling churches, reacted with predictable outrage and incomprehension when I accepted a commission in the Army Chaplain Corps a few months later, stood waving silently and alone as I boarded the plane that would take me to the port of embarkation. And that was all the marriage we ever had.
She was killed about eighteen months later when some half-trained National Guardsmen panicked and opened fire on a group of peace marchers during a demonstration she had helped organize.
Maxey didn’t understand at all.
“So how the hell,” she demanded, “does this make you a murderer?”
“She was my wife.”
“So...?”
“I was her husband, and I was as much against the war as she was, though for different reasons, and if I’d been there she would still be alive. But I wasn’t.”
Maxey finished her coffee slowly and thoughtfully and put the cup down with exaggerated care and looked at me with a face that said I was the damnedest fool she’d come across, and not an especially likable one, either.
“You know...I killed my husband,” she said.
It was a subject we had never discussed; she’d told me she had been married once and wasn’t anymore and we’d left it at that. Now she sat waiting for me to react, and all I could do was sit still and wait for her to explain.
“He was a second-year medical student,” she went on when she was sure I wasn’t going to speak. “That gave him an out as far as the draft was concerned. The thing in ’Nam was going strong, but it would have been over by the time he graduated and finished internship. And that’s how it would have gone if we hadn’t had a fight over whether or not I should start nurse’s training.”
I thought I could see where the story was going, and drew breath to interrupt. But she paid no attention.
“The way it went down,” she said, “I enrolled one day and he went down to the Marine Corps recruiting station the next. Five months later I got the Navy Department’s deepest regrets.”
“Maxey—”
“Don’t Maxey me!”
It was the first time I’d seen her really angry, and it was worth seeing. But I didn’t have the leisure to examine the phenomenon.
“I loved Bart Jelannek—that was his goddam name; I don’t think I ever mentioned it before and I’m sure not going to again, awake or asleep—as much as any woman could love any man on this earth and maybe more because I hadn’t even looked at anyone else from the time he walked into my third grade class the day after his folks moved into the neighborhood. In two or three ways that are pretty important, getting that telegram was the end of my life as much as the end of his. So don’t tell me about loving or mourning or who is responsible for who.
“I got word that he was dead on the day before an important exam, and if I’d wanted to build Bart a monument that he’d have recognized I could have given up right there and blown the damn thing and gotten kicked out of nursing school, which I didn’t much like anyhow, and that would have been just great, because you could make a pretty good case that my being in that school and not being willing to back out when he wanted me to had gotten him killed.
“But I read the telegram and folded it into the back of a half-empty photo album of the marriage and went back to the books and passed the exam.”
She paused for a moment, and the fierceness of her expression softened a little.
“I let myself cry after it was over,” she said, “and there were probably more tears for having held them back a whole day. But I did it alone in the room where I lived, and you are the first human being who ever heard any of this from me. I wouldn’t b
e saying any of it now, either, except that I like you and I’m glad to know you and I’d like to go on knowing you.
“But I don’t build monuments to dead people and I can’t afford to be friends with anyone who does.
“You say you used to be a priest. Episcopal. I don’t know much about that. I was raised Catholic and turned in my knee pads about three days after I was confirmed, and haven’t been to mass or confession or any of the rest of that stuff since. But if an Episcopal priest is anything like a Catholic one, death is something you’re supposed to be able to handle, isn’t it?”
I started to answer, but she went on without waiting.
“My husband died because he did things that got him killed. Him. Not me. I didn’t send him to the damn recruiting office and I didn’t ship him to ’Nam. I was sorry when he died, because I loved him and you want people that you love to stay alive, right?
“But I didn’t kill him and I’m not going to live the rest of my life paying off on a bum rap.
“He was a man grown, in charge of himself, or I wouldn’t have married him in the first place—and I think your Sara was the same. She got killed because she was doing something she wanted to do and thought was important enough to take chances for, and if you can’t respect that, then you’re a lot less of a man than I took you for.”
She stopped talking again. But not to let me talk back.
And when she resumed, all the anger and remembered pain were gone from her voice, replaced by something at once stronger and less imperious.
“The dead are worth tears, lover,” she said. “I cried mine and you cried yours. And they’re worth remembering because as long as anyone can remember them, a little part of them is still alive. Anyway, that’s what my grandma always taught me, and I never saw any reason to doubt her.
“But monuments, no.
“A gravestone or a wreath on the water sometimes. Maybe. If it makes you feel better and you need it. But more than that is not just silly, it’s sick and it’s disgusting in a way that I don’t even want to think about.
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